TheAppleBlog

Apple is taking a lot of stick (even more than usual) about hanging tough with premium pricing despite the global financial meltdown, and it almost never offers discounts or sales. So how can budget-constrained Macheads economize on system upgrades? One solution is to buy a less-expensive model than the one you would have perhaps [...]

I quickly became addicted to Spotlight when I upgraded to Tiger back in 2005, but why, I wondered, did Apple have to ruin easy filename searches in the Tiger Find dialog, after just finally getting them working right in Panther?
Of course you can run filename searches in Tiger (and Leopard), but it involves configuring tedious [...]

I was pleased that Apple resisted going to the ultra-wide 16:9 (WXGA/HDTV) screen aspect ratio that’s becoming popular in PC laptops for the new unibody MacBook revisions, sticking with the 16:10 (WXGA+/WSXGA) proportions carried over from the aluminum PowerBooks and older MacBooks.
By my lights, 16:10 is plenty wide enough, and I would actually prefer more [...]

In the lull between Christmas and New Years, Intel released its new Q9000 quad-core mobile processor, and PC maker Acer almost simultaneously its Q9000-powered Aspire 8930G-7665 “extreme gaming” and multimedia notebook computer with an 18″ 1920 x 1080 pixel 16:9 aspect ratio display.
Many Mac notebook fans and watchers had been hoping that Apple would roll [...]

A tip of the hat to fellow TheAppleBlog contributor Clayton Lai in his recent column NVIDIA Killed My 2007 MacBook Pro, and the people who commented with similar tales of premature hardware failure woe, for finally convincing me to cross the late 2008 MacBook Pro off my short list of candidates for my next system [...]

There’s pretty universal consensus in the Mac portable community that Apple jumped the gun in dropping FireWire support from the new unibody MacBooks, with nothing adequate to replace its full functionality. Sure, you can transfer and backup files reasonably efficiently over a USB 2.0 connection, but you can’t boot your Mac (at least conveniently and [...]

Disappointed? Not me!
I thought Apple’s farewell Macworld Expo keynote had plenty of substance, notwithstanding that Phil Schiller lacks Steve Jobs’ on-stage presence and charisma. Phil had an unenviable assignment, and I think he carried it off well. I’ve been astonished and saddened by a quite large proportion of reaction and commentary declaring the keynote “disappointing,” [...]

I imagine most people using OS 10.5 have become acquainted with Quick Look, which is one of my favorite Leopard features. Quick Look’s basic function, as its name suggests, is as a quick and convenient way to take a peek at what’s in a file without actually opening the file, switching Finder views or opening [...]

Got a MacBook for Christmas? I’ve used laptop computers almost exclusively for a dozen years now, and they’ve been great, but for day in, day out, workhorse duty the standard laptop configuration does have serious ergonomic deficiencies.
If you position the computer high enough for comfortable and ergonomically healthy viewing angle to the screen, your wrists [...]

Mouse technology has advanced a lot over the past two decades. The Apple Lisa-derived mouse with its DE-9 connector and thumb screws that attached it securely to my first Mac, a 1988 Mac Plus, was a pretty crude piece of engineering, with an analog ball of course, and a noisy, long-travel, somewhat stiff single button. [...]

Apple’s new notebook-oriented 24-inch LED Cinema Display is certainly a glorious piece of equipment. If you’re not up to speed, this 24-inch LED-backlit 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution glossy-finish widescreen unit includes a built-in iSight video camera, mic and speakers in an elegant, thin aluminum and glass enclosure stylistically consonant with the new unibody MacBooks [...]

Apple’s decision to not equip the new unibody MacBook with a FireWire port has been as popular as the proverbial skunk at a garden party, at least with seasoned Mac users. Aside from the MacBook Air, which suffers from manifold deficiencies in the I/O department, the last Apple portable that shipped without FireWire was the [...]

How many Mac fans are still using OS 9? It’s a difficult statistic to track, or at least I’ve found it so. Hitslink’s November 2008 market share report shows pre-Intel Mac operating systems still represent a respectable (nearly three times the penetration of Linux) 2.35 percent of total OS usage (vs. 6.51 percent for MacIntel), [...]

Have a MacBook that is a hottie, literally?
Today’s laptop computers, from the 1.6 GHz MacBook Air on up, have more performance than most of us need, but the downside is heat. When I first reviewed Targus’s Chill Mat product nearly four years ago, it was a utilitarian-looking device that did its job efficiently enough, [...]

An unheralded new feature Apple quietly added to OS X 10.5 Leopard is the ability to create, expand, or shrink hard drive partitions without erasing the entire drive. Several third-party applications can repartition drives as well, but it is a function that had never previously been built into the Mac OS.
Provided there is open, unwritten [...]

Funtastic Photos is an amazingly powerful, feature-packed, easy to use little photo editor application. The user interface is clean and uncluttered in homage to iLife conventions, but a vast array of photo correction and enhancement tools are included.
Funtastic Photos taps into OS X technologies like the Quartz graphics engine, Spotlight, and ImageIO Kit, and offers [...]

The 13″ aluminum MacBook is an “almost” machine. It appeals to me in many aspects, being a roughly three-quarter-sized unibody MacBook Pro at a substantially lower price. But it falls just short of the slam-dunk it might have been.
For me, probably the biggest negative is the lack of a FireWire port. I think I could [...]

One of the reasons I’m a die-hard laptop aficionado is that I live in a rural area where power blackouts are not uncommon. Late November usually brings at least one with the arrival of the first major winter storm. This year proved no exception, with a major gale roaring in off the Atlantic last Friday [...]

One of the things I loved about the old Mac OS Classic was that to create a bootable disk, all you had to do was make a folder named System Folder, drag in System and Finder files and an Appearance Folder, then drag your bare-bones System Folder to a disk — hard drive, Zip, floppy, [...]

For basic photo editing, if you’re running OS X 10.5 Leopard you don’t need Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator. Leopard’s Preview graphics viewer application is much more than a viewer; it now incorporates some very handy image correction tools that are not only user-friendly and intuitive to use, but also work really well.
Consequently, if you take [...]